Like Google, Shazam’s name has crept into popular consciousness as both a verb and a noun. In fact, a song or sound identified by the app is known as “a Shazam." That isn’t all it has in common with Google since Shazam is an innovative, sound search engine. Keep reading to find out more about Shazam’s origins.
Shazam’s Origins
When Apple launched the App Store in 2008, Shazam was among the original smartphone applications. However, the service was already up and running for years.
When the prototype of Shazam debuted in 2002, no one had smartphones. Users would call a hotline and then hold their phone up to the speaker. The app would identify the song details to the user. After all, cell phones were pretty basic.
“Beyond making phone calls, the most sophisticated things that people did with mobile phones at that time were to install ringtones, send text messages, and, if you were really cutting-edge, possibly subscribe to sports score updates via text message.” Shazam co-founder Chris Barton told podcaster Danielle Newnham via Medium.
However, Barton had a vision he shared with Shazam co-founders and the OG team Dhiraj Mukherjee, Philip Inghelbrecht, and Avery Wang. In 1999, Barton got the idea of creating a music identification service. He was an MBA student at the time and regularly bounced business ideas off classmate and friend Inghelbrecht. Here are two photos of the founders of Shazam shot 20 years apart.
At the time, several other companies were working on developing a music identification service limited to radio play. This wouldn’t be useful if you heard a song you want to identify in a club or shopping.
Barton added, “Suddenly, I thought, “What if someone could identify the song using the actual sound of the music captured over the mobile phone?”
When asked how he felt about Shazam’s longevity, he told MUO via email, “I always thought Shazam would be a popular product among mobile phone users, but wow, I am so delighted that it actually happened after such a long road!”
How Shazam Works
As an audio search engine, Shazam works by identifying a snippet of a song and creating a “digital fingerprint” to recognize it faster in the future. Much like our own fingerprints, the audio fingerprint has a distinctive pattern of data unique to the song or sound clip. The technology was developed by Shazam co-founder Avery Wang who took the lead in creating the algorithm.
The algorithm, as Wang explained it in a paper from Columbia University, is “noise and distortion resistant, computationally efficient, and massively scalable, capable of quickly identifying a short segment of music captured through a cellphone microphone in the presence of foreground voices and other dominant noise, and through voice codec compression, out of a database of over a million tracks.”
In 2002, Shazam’s database contained one million songs, as reported by the Guardian. It usually took about 15 seconds to identify whether the song was in the database and to identify it. The app grew as the algorithm improved, and with the development of more powerful smartphones, Shazam can match a sound against its database of over a billion songs within seconds. Even remixes, cover versions, and background noise are not problems for Shazam.
Nowadays, when you use Shazam, the app gives you the name of the track, the artist’s name, and biography and as well as additional information like the lyrics, video, links to buy concert tickets, and other recommendations.
Key Shazam Milestones
1999: Barton and co-founders came up with the idea while bouncing potential business ideas.
Starting 2000: Shazam Entertainment, LTD is formed. Wang developed new music and sound identification technology.
2002: Shazam launched as a service where users would call and hold their phone up to a speaker and then later receive a text message once the song was identified.
April 19, 2002: “Jeepster” by T-Rex was the first song Shazamed.
September 2002: “Cleanin’ Out My Closet” by Eminem was the first song to reach 1,000 Shazams.
July 2008: The Shazam app debuted in the brand-new Apple App Store. The first song identified using the iPhone app was “How Am I Different” by Aimee Mann.
October 2008: Shazam became available to Android users.
2011: Shazam’s identification features expanded to include television shows and commercials, making it a true sound identification tool.
February 2012: “TiK ToK” by Ke$ha was the first song to reach one million Shazams.
April 2015: People can now Shazam using their Apple Watch.
May 25, 2017: The game show “Beat Shazam” premiered on Fox.
September 2018: Apple acquires Shazam, reportedly paying $400 million.
June 2021: Monthly Shazams reach 1 billion.
May 2022: Shazam exceeds 2 billion lifetime installs and 70 billion Shazams.
In 2022, Shazam turned 20 years, and, to celebrate, Apple Music released a “20 Years of Shazam Hits” playlist featuring many of the songs with the most Shazams. If you don’t use Apple Music, you can still access the Shazam 20 years top 20 playlist on Spotify, which is an alternative playlist created by a Spotify user.
Shazam’s Integration
Shazam integrates well with popular music platforms, so you can add your Shazams to your Spotify and Apple Music libraries. Not only can it help you discover music, but it helps you build your library and playlist.
The platform is available through Shazam’s browser app, the App Store, Google Play, Chrome Web Store, and Galaxy Store. So no matter what operating system you use, you can still quickly use Shazam to identify your new favorite songs.
The Future for Shazam
Shazam changed how people interact with and discover music. It has become part of many music lovers’ daily lives as they use the app to identify songs they hear anywhere. Will it continue to do so under the helm of Apple?
If you enjoy learning about the history of the apps you use daily, Netflix also has a notable history as another innovative service that changed how we watch films and shows.
